Wordpress

For the redesign of this site, I wanted to implement various design elements, in particular related to the Responsive Design, made possible by iThemes Builder.

One of those elements is that when visiting the home (blog index) page in mobile view, only the excerpt on the first post is displayed, all other posts are displayed as titles only. Of course, I could have edited the theme file to add a counter, and conditional code to display or not display the excerpt. However, I try to minimise changes to template files, and prefer to use a function, and CSS to accomplish such functionality.

In principle using the Google (or any other) CDN makes sense for a standalone site or application. However, WordPress is an open source application, and there are thousands of developers creating plugins and themes for WordPress, all in their own way.

From my experience as a Support Manager, I encounter a lot of "issues" with caching plugins in WordPress. It is good to understand what these plugins do (in general) and when to use them, and when not.

Every now and then, I get asked to do some customisations, and the one that regularly pops up is "I want to display posts in columns, {insert any number here} next to each other, just like in such-and-such (magazine) theme". I created a piece of code that I am comfortable with, is easy to customise and adjust.

Yesterday, Nov. 25, 2010, WordPress 3.1 Beta 1 was released for testing purposes. There's a feature stop, which means that the beta testing period will be used to collect and squash any bugs that are found.

I had a quick look at what I thought were the most interesting "front-end" features, while the most promising backend feature without doubt it the new post-formats.

WordPress 3 comes with integrated menu management. Although still a bit quirky at times, it makes creating and managing (navigation) menus a breeze. However, now that creating and displaying a menu takes nothing more than one line of code (wp_nav_menu), we appear to have lost the ability to "manually" add our own stuff.